The KIRA Awards' Selection Committee yesterday announced the finalists for the 2013 Knowledge Industry Recognition and Achievement award.

The winners of the New Brunswick award will be named at a dinner May 2 at the Fredericton Convention Centre. Information on the tickets is available here.

The nominees are:

Exporters

•Green Imaging Technologies Inc. •LuminUltra •Vimsoft

Most Promising Start-Up

•IntroHive •Rt Tech Software Inc. •TotalPave

Technological Advancement and/or Innovation - Private

•Inversa Systems •Smart Skin Technologies •SPIELO International

Technological

The Entrepreneurs with Disabilities Network invited me to speak yesterday on a subject I hadn’t thought about much – early adopters. It led me to ask what makes a good early adopter, and who’s the best early adopter in Atlantic Canada.

It was a thoroughly unscientific exercise, but I searched through my lists of companies and old articles. When I spoke at the EDN Entrepreneur of the Year event last night, I gave the top spot to Emera of Halifax.

The first thing I was looking for was number of partnerships with startups, and Emera boasts varying degrees of involvement with at least three

DemoCamp Halifax will hold a mini, mid-season event on the night of Sunday, April 21, at Durty Nelly’s Pub on Argyle Street.

Billed as Mini DemoCamp Halifax, the event will feature a keynote address by David Crow, a co-founder of StartupNorth and the Evangelist in Residence at OMERS Ventures in Toronto. Crow will be in Halifax for a mentoring session with Toon Nagtegaal’s NextPhase, and will finish out the weekend with his speech to a gaggle of local tech enthusiasts.

Founded by TitanFile Co-Founder Milan Vrekic, DemoCamp Halifax has been held in each of the past two years. The startups

Equals6, the Halifax-based professional social network for students, will soon launch a crowdfunding scholarship program in which people or organizations can help students raise funds for tuition over the Internet.

The two-year-old company has been active in raising money for scholarships for deserving students, amassing $40,000 for 140 Top Talent Scholarships in its brief history. What is new is the company is now adding a crowdfunding element to the scholarships, meaning other people can add to a scholarship once it’s posted on the Internet. It also means students can use the Equals6

The good patrons of Picaroons Brewtique may soon be helping to produce medical compounds each time they hoist a pint at the Fredericton microbrewery.

Picaroons is in talks with Fredericton biotech Mycodev Group Inc. on a plan to help the startup produce chitosan, a compound that has a range of industrial uses, including pharmaceutical ingredients, water treatment, fertilizer and cosmetics. Chitosan is usually extracted from the shells of shellfish, but Mycodev founder David Brown has devised a way to produce it from fungus.

“The fungus is a lot better in terms of the constant supply,”

When I asked Ulrike Bahr-Gedalia what her three priorities will be as the new CEO of Digital Nova Scotia, she paused and answered: attracting talent, bringing women into ITC, and technical education.

Then she added advocacy for digital industries.

She looked down the list I’d jotted down, laughed and said, “I guess that’s four, isn’t it?”

That one episode from our interview Thursday gives some idea of the energy and ambition of the first full-time CEO of the association for IT industries in Nova Scotia. It also should shed some light on the magnitude of the task before her.

Digital

Seeets, the Charlottetown startup that operates a web-based rideshare service in the Maritimes, is setting its sights on an expansion into Ontario later this year after improving its existing service.

Seeets is the operator of Maritime Rideshare, an online marketplace that matches people driving between Maritime cities with people looking for a lift. The service has been in existence for almost a year and a half and its co-founders recently completed the Launch36 accelerator, during which they focused on an expansion strategy and ways to improve the service.

“Throughout Launch36, a lot

When Steve Mallett entered the Launch36 accelerator last autumn, he did so as one of the most experienced entrepreneurs ever to go through the tech development program.

Based in the Saint John suburb of Quispamsis, Mallett is the CEO of RUMAnalytics, a software-as-a-service product that accelerates the speed at which browsers call up e-commerce sites so clients aren’t driven away by slow browsing before the site gets a chance to sell its wares.

It’s the product of a guy who launched his first web enterprise in 1999 — a pure-content site called OSDir.com, which provided news, blogs and

Now that it has signed its first customer and identified its first project, Saint John-based Wicked Ideas, which is devoted to the constructive online debate of controversial issues, is looking for its first group of investors.

The company, which recently graduated from the Launch36 accelerator for start-ups, uses journalism and other content to frame a calm discussion about controversial issues with the goal of understanding them.

Founder and CEO Lisa Hrabluk says Wicked Ideas is looking for $250,000 in funding, which will help it build its website, develop its business, and pay

Xiplinx Technologies, a New Brunswick company that helps manufacturers monitor compliance activities in their production lines, has drawn about $500,000 of funding, and could double that amount by early May.

All in, the company that graduated from the Launch36 accelerator’s first cohort last June is hoping to book about $1 million in equity and non-dilutive funding in its first round, said CEO Brent MacDonald in an interview.

Xiplinx (pronounced Zip-links) allows manufacturers to use hand-held devices to record and analyze in real time what is happening on the factory floor to improve